Canadian Student Wins $2000 Journalism Award

HonestReporting is proud to announce that Aidan Fishman, 20, from Winnipeg, Canada, is the winner of the inaugural Blankfeld Award for Quality Journalism.

We received entries from aspiring student writers from around the globe, including the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and the UK. HonestReporting staff members and HR Board member Max Blankfeld, the sponsor of the $2000 award, were joined by the Jerusalem Post’s Political Editor Gil Hoffman on the judging panel.

Dedicated to the memory of Eli Blankfeld, a journalist who documented Jewish life in Germany after World War II and during the period surrounding the creation of the State of Israel, after having lost his parents and sisters during the Holocaust, the Blankfeld Award for Quality Journalism recognizes aspiring journalists who demonstrate a commitment to the values of objective and honest reporting, specifically in the field of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

It was a unanimous decision to give this year’s award to Aidan Fishman, currently majoring in International Relations at the University of Toronto. Aidan has been a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Jewish Review and has also been published in the Jerusalem Post’s opinion section.

Aidan is an active member of the Jewish communities of both Winnipeg and Toronto and is an active Israel advocate on his campus where he was a founding member of a new, grassroots, student-run pro-Israel group at the University of Toronto, known as Israel on Campus. In the broader Canadian Jewish community, Aidan was a University Fellow for CJPAC (the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee), which recruits Canada’s brightest young Jewish and non-Jewish political minds to preserve Canada’s robust support for Israel in both the next few years and in coming generations.

On receiving his certificate and a check for $2000, Aidan commented:

I’m really honored and humbled to receive the Blankfeld Award. The Middle East needs journalists who bring objective and informative news to the public, not spin and preconceived “narratives”. And that’s exactly what HonestReporting encourages and rewards.

HonestReporting’s Managing Editor, Simon Plosker said:

We were extremely impressed with the quality of the applicants’ submissions and the commitment shown in their writing. While it was a shame that we could not reward many more of the students for their efforts, Aidan was a stand-out winner and we are confident that he is definitely one to watch both now and in the future.